Lay Me Down
by CircadianLily
Summary: A serial killer, slowly gaining notoriety, has already claimed the lives of three high school boys. Another has gone missing. A shadow of the third victim still clings to this world, reaching, if he can, to save the fourth victim from the same fate. USUK.
1. Chapter 1

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Whenever Arthur imagined the Butcher's house, probably far more often than what would be considered healthy, he saw the rusty edges of old blood where the carpet met the wall, he could smell the moist decay of bodies beneath floorboards, and could see the large taxidermy crows peering down from branches that twisted from the walls like long, palsied fingers.

Arthur always did have a vivid imagination.

Some said his morose imagination was part of his charm. Others thought it was something that needed to be cured with intensive therapy. His mother in particular hated hearing his morbid ideas, often blaming his estranged father for fueling his head with stories of tormented, trapped souls, or of mythological hags that held people down in their sleep, or any other account of unnatural things that went bump in the night.

Shifting his attention from his ruminations back to the Butcher's house, he imagined there would be a coffee table littered with the latest issues of _Psychopath Weekly_ and _Insanity Fair_, swollen with scribbled notes like his mother's crochet magazines. The murderer himself might even be standing there, scarlet-spattered and grinning with that maniacal gleam in his eyes.

But no. Right now, the Butcher wasn't there at all.

Arthur paused as his imagination ceased and reality sunk in with the surety and blackened clarity of molasses. His chest still steadily rose and fell despite no longer needing the crisp air around him. He could almost feel his heart throbbing, loud and helpless, as it had in this very spot for one last time. But that was only the memory of a pulse.

His eyes continued to slide slowly across the Butcher's living room.

The first thing he noticed was how treacherously normal everything appeared to be. The sofa and chairs were upholstered in a faded floral pattern, plainly arranged around a modest sized television. The lighting was standard and gaudy knickknacks lined the shelves. There's even an embroidered frame on the wall—pale blue stitches spelling out "Home Sweet Home." As if anyone sweet lived here. The beige carpet was as outdated as the room's furnishings. It was as if he had walked into his grandmother's home.

Arthur's attention was next drawn to the chest that supported the television. One of the doors hung open a crack and a small twinkle from its murky depths emerged. He reached out and swung the door open on its creaky hinges, half expecting to see an assortment of paring knives. Instead, there stood a line of shot glasses. Some looked to be mementos from trips to Mexico, the Bahamas, and even other parts of the States.

"Look at all of you," Arthur cocked a brow as he peered inside. "Lined up like toy soldiers."

He vaguely remembered that the Butcher collected them in his spare time. "Correction," he muttered to himself. "Used to collect."

Arthur snatched one with a hideous depiction of cacti across the surface, the pickle color having faded into a sickly lime green, from age or, perhaps, the Butcher's relentless polishing. He launched it across the room where it shattered. A hot rage was twisting inside, the memory of heat bleeding across what was left of him. He continued without pause. The pounding was now in his head. The state ones were next, followed by the more exotic, aged collection. They each exploded, one by one, against the back of the front door that remained forever bolted, salting the carpet with tiny shards of glass.

Once the cabinet was emptied, Arthur clamped his fingers under the edge of the coffee table and heaved it forward onto its top, sending the magazines flapping across the room and the ashtray thudding to the floor. His throat was cold and motionless despite the violence of his actions—a throat that may have once been raw with screaming and rage, was now silenced. A mammoth dish of alabaster rolled off on its side, ridges beating a rhythm across the thin carpet. It collided with the chest, rocking the standing television precariously before it settled.

Arthur tilted his head; messy hair getting into his eyes. A feverish gaze assessed the room for further damage. A slow grin carved its way across his lips.

"That won't do."

He shoved the chest with his weight, and watched as the television toppled to the edge of the thrown coffee table with a loud crash. The screen cracked loudly, tiny splinters of glass that twinkled like morning dew. The exquisite noise echoed through the small house.

Next—the kitchen.

Eyeing his handiwork with a smug turn of his lips, Arthur made his way over to the next room though the old-fashioned, swing door. He first threw opened the cabinets, dragging out small dishtowels and rags. He collected a nice pile by the time his not-so-gentle search was over, and soon, he was stuffing them into the cracks beneath the door and anywhere else the water would escape. Of course it would seep through, but it would delay the water's escape. After stopping the sink drains, he turned on the water and waited patiently for the sinks to fill, watching with silent delight as it spilled over, cascading to the tiled floor. An hour later, the water created a half moon of wetness out into the living room carpet. Soon there would be a nice little lake for the Butcher to play in.

Overlooking the vandalism, the house was the kind of place anyone could have lived in. Even the killer of three high school boys from New Dover Heights, Massachusetts.

It all started the summer before Arthur's senior year, when Johnny Lenoir hadn't arrived home after getting smashed at a kegger. Instead, he appeared in several Ziploc freezer bags down by the waterway eight days later. Everything went bat-shit crazy after that.

Curfews were reinstated. Buddy-ups were formed for the kids whose houses didn't warrant bus stops. Cameras were installed at local parks for shady-looking scamperers. Arthur had been pretty sure that the Butcher—as the locals began to call him after the second victim—was not a scamperer. Those cameras weren't about catching the serial killer. They were about parents pretending that their children were playing on swing sets instead of holed up in some sweaty basement, grabbing at liquor and falling victim to grabby hands.

Despite an obvious love of everything vintage, band tees, and giving his mother heart palpitations, Arthur hadn't been particularly interested in the Butcher case at the time—not while he was still freshly moved to this town from across the Atlantic. He would have, if pressed, admitted to a certain fascination with sociopaths, and he had spent more than a few 'library enrichment' hours scouring the Encyclopedia of Tragedy and Mayhem, but news about a couple of missing boys didn't catch his attention.

What did intrigue him was the 'disconnectedness-from-guilt' trait that seemed to trail their lot. He'd been accused of the same behavior on more than one occasion. Whether he was guilty of actually having these issues was debatable. Lord only knows the counselors at his school were more than happy to discuss what they termed his 'oppositional defiance' at every chance they could to his mother.

Arthur's thoughts on that had been consistent, clear, and resounding. Two fingered salutes to everyone involved.

The school counselor should have been more interested in the actual sociopaths in the neighborhood, rather than playing amateur psychologist with his school records. Why couldn't they have fixated on the Butcher like he was the new fad diet as everyone else had in New Dover Heights?

Eventually Arthur was, too. But it turned out that someone very close to him had to make the Butcher's cut in order to grab his attention. Very close.

Which brings him back to destroying the homes of serial killers. No matter how exhilarating destruction can be, things have a tendency to become boring after a while. Quite stale, indeed. What made it even worse was that the Butcher never replaced anything he broke, which essentially stripped the fun out of fucking up his shit. No more shot glasses, no ashtrays, and even the television was replaced only by a shitty little clock radio. Arthur could only flip his coffee table over so many times before it became futile.

So, why was he still here? He wanted to know the same thing.

Arthur Kirkland was the third victim.

He vaguely remembered, like silky dark dreams, walking back from a party that he should've never attended. The bitter November air nipped harshly at his skin through his thin black sweatshirt. Arthur wasn't really one for those sorts of so-called parties, but after months of constant coaxing and teasing, he had finally been convinced into actually attending by an acquaintance who shared similar dislikes against the school's social structure. Truthfully, however; Arthur had thought this acquaintance was an idiot who just liked to smoke under the football bleachers and wore stupid things to attract attention.

The party was no more than awkward conversations while drifting about a cluttered, badly lit home that smelled like an alcoholic's paradise: cheap vodka and vomit-stained carpets. He'd left around midnight, obscenely early according to the idiot acquaintance.

Arthur's home wasn't far. It really wasn't.

No one was sober enough to drive him anywhere, though a few had offered. He should have accepted. Better to die being thrown through the windshield than to be tortured for hours beneath the knife of a psychopath.

It shouldn't have ended like that. He wasn't done. He had things to do. People to apologize to. Ways he could have been a little different.

When he was alive, the frozen air gnawed painfully at his lungs. Clouds of hot breath caressed his cheeks. He had pulled the hood tightly over his head in poor effort to trap the warmth. His feet were sore in his old Docs as he walked beneath the yellow light of neighborhood streetlights. His brain felt like it was swimming in his head and thoughts were fuzzy with liquor. And soon after, the fine hairs on the back of his neck rose with a nasty feeling.

A cold descended over the presently dead Arthur, the rest was always a bit more difficult to recall in his death-state. It was like trying to grasp onto a glimpses of wispy images, flashes of vivid memory that stung like hot shards of broken glass.

Arthur wasn't sure what he had expected to happen in the afterlife. Wasn't there supposed to be some light at the end of the tunnel? Wasn't he supposed to automatically _go_ somewhere?

Instead, the first thing he remembered in his death-state was waking up in the middle of the woods, huddled in the fetal position with his back against a gnarled, ancient tree that stood proudly above the others. The first thing he noticed was that the pain was gone. But then he also realized that he could, in fact, feel nothing. Whenever the wind picked up, he failed to feel it tug at his clothes. His hands couldn't feel the dry crackling of autumn leaves beneath his fingers or the frozen, compact dirt. The world looked a bit off—slightly unclear and not quite as vivid as it should've been. The colors were weaker—like a canvas of monotones. If he weren't concentrating so hard on it, the world may have been easy to ignore.

Peering down at himself, he appeared to be wearing the same clothes that he had been in hours before his death—the dilapidated, black sweatshirt carelessly worn over a band-tee that a friend had given him. A worn pair of jeans. His old Docs. None of it was mutilated or stained. Almost exactly as if he had just been walking down that cold, dark street.

After picking himself up, he took a few steps forward and came upon another odd insight. The leaves moved as he walked past.

Arthur gave a sideways glance at them as he tried moving through them once more. They wafted softly, as if stirred by nature's sigh. Green eyes widened marginally and he was sure that if he were still alive, his pulse would have risen. He was pretty sure that he wasn't supposed to move things. If that were nature's law, then there probably would be more incidents of the living world being affected by the trapped dead… if that even made any sense.

Right? Right.

Several minutes passed after that. But he soon found that time seemed nonexistent in this new death-state. All the same, he was aware that a substantial amount of it had been spent testing the waters of his new environment. He found that like any good paranormal show will tell you, spirits could pass through things. Although it fucking hurt, in a non-living sense, of course. It wasn't pain, only a sense of intense uneasiness. Arthur could hardly manage the shivering the first time he passed through the tree he had woken next to. He could feel every parched, dying molecule squeeze past whatever was left of him.

He knew that he probably didn't have any substance, but he couldn't get rid of the memory of substance… the memory of breathing… and the memory of a warm pulse and of feeling cold. In essence, he could still feel these things as if he were still living. But they weren't real. Just faded memories of the real thing.

In his honest opinion, it was easier to move things than it was to pass through them. That didn't seem normal… or whatever was considered normal in this in-between stage of life and death.

Wandering further into the woods, he found another peculiarity. He couldn't move past a certain point. He physically froze, as if stopped by an invisible wall… or more accurately, as if strings were pulling him back, rooting him to a specific spot. Apparently he wasn't allowed to go where he pleased. Arthur really was trapped.

Next was to feel the area, to know where he _could_ go. The further he walked back where he didn't feel the invisible strain, he noticed something in the distance. A weighty chill crawled through the teenager when he saw a familiar roof through the trees. The Butcher's shed.

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Afterlife memories were interrupted the moment Arthur glanced out the Butcher's back window after having damaged his living room. His backyard was a neglected mess, covered in weeds. Brown, crackled leaves skittered across the ground like rats. They piled against the tiny building, rustling as though trying to speak. The sound of metal grating against metal echoed, stiffening Arthur's memory of a body.

Without looking in the smoky window in the back of the shed, he knew what the killer was doing—sharpening his tools, scraping his big thumb over the blades. Knives. Cleavers. Little curved paring instruments with loops on the end. A shiver rippled through him, and he nearly stepped back and considered running. Well, running as far as he could, huddled against that invisible line like some pathetic child who wanted to escape an unending nightmare.

A lot of good that will do. The bastard will just keep on doing it.

Arthur made his way across the lawn, the weeds barely moving against his footfalls before he slipped though the crack in the shed's doorway.

The Butcher was resting against his workbench, relaxed and confident, his work uniform spattered with blood as dry as an artist's long-forgotten clay, and open to his sweaty bare chest. His tattoo was clearly visible, a heart with a rope coiled around it, inscribed with words '_And now for something new_.'

The phrase crept up Arthur's spine like a freshly spawned brood of baby spiders. If the Butcher had been able to see him, it would have appeared that he shimmered in the air like ice crystals in a fog. But he couldn't, of course. The last time he'd seen Arthur was the day he'd killed him.

The Butcher was a tall man and absolutely, positively too normal-looking. Daniel was his real name. And he wore his standard brown hair cropped close to his skull, and he had bland metal-framed glasses that cast only the slightest shadow across the apple of his cheek. He was neither good-looking nor ugly, not too tall nor too short. He was a little doughy around the waist, and his nose had a point. Daniel Shaffer was so average that you'd never even notice him until he was upon you. Arthur hadn't.

He coughed then, a phlegmy rattle that bounced off the walls, interrupting his thoughts once more, just as he'd begun to relive the miserable day he'd abducted him. Arthur hoped the cough was a symptom of something incapacitating, the beginnings of tuberculosis or lung cancer. Ebola. A disease that'd knock the Butcher on his ass.

When he glanced up at him again, a chill blew straight through him. His eyes bored into Arthur's, black with something—lust, he suspected—and the fear coursed through his veins like a fever.

"Uh…" The sound escaped him mouth like air leaking from a tire.

A sinister grin played at the corners of the Butcher's lips, twitching there like an electrocution. The smile was all too familiar to Arthur, and he felt the inevitable panic coming. A train ready to derail.

News at eleven. He wasn't looking at him. How could he be? It's not like he was visible.

Arthur's heart sank, and his carefully cultivated rage disappeared, replaced by something darker. He knew what he was about to see before he turned to look at the old-fashioned school desk bolted into the floor in the corner.

Another boy.

This boy, despite being larger than him and well-defined with lean muscle, looked a bit younger than him when he'd died, maybe sixteen. There was something about him, something that inscribed a certain innocence, someone who had still barely experienced the world. The teenager was tied to the desk with fishing line; the line ringed him, making his entire outfit (and skin) look like wide-wale corduroy. He wore a faded pair of jeans matched with a worn pair of running shoes. A nondescript navy blue tee beneath a letterman jacket. A brief glance at the achievement patches on the sleeve told Arthur that he was into sports. His hair, a dirty gold hung limply across his glistening forehead. Glasses were perched at the bridge of his nose, slightly askew.

"_Shit_… another one."

The alarm was gone in an instant, replaced with cold fury. Arthur began to run numbers. The Butcher never kept anyone longer than a week.

Johnny Lenoir.

Aiden Barry.

Himself.

One week. Every time.

Arthur circled the new teenager, scanning his exposed skin for bruising, for marks. The only thing he could find was a milky crust dried at the corners of the boy's lips like a cold sore—the residue of whatever it was the Butcher drugged his victims with.

This one was new. _Brand-new_. Fresh.

Arthur was sure that was how the Butcher saw him. Just like the others. Over the next week, there'd be no food, only a little water, and zero bathroom breaks. The abrading would start soon—Daniel loved his nutmeg grater. Then the cutting.

_Dammit!_

Arthur paced the room, stabbing the killer with furious glares. If he'd only been able to haunt Shaffer the day before, given him something to tweak out other than his psychotic urges, maybe he could have stopped this one. He was sure he'd managed to derail a few of his abductions simply by providing him with some vandalism to clean up. He certainly wouldn't have found the time to stalk and abduct this poor boy if he'd been busy bailing out his house like a sinking rowboat.

But that didn't matter now. He was on a deadline.

Arthur crouched beside the boy and ran his fingers carefully over the boy's hair, making sure not to displace any and draw the attention of the Butcher's obsessive gaze.

"I'll take care of you," he whispered. "I'm going to get you out of here and away from this sick fuck. Don't worry." The last words were ridiculous, he knew. How could the boy do anything but worry? Even now, as subdued as his victim was, his jaw was clenched, his knuckles white in their death grip on the edges of the old wooden school desk. Tensing up for battle.

"That's good," Arthur murmured into the boy's ear. "You're smart to prepare yourself for the worst."

And then, as he knew the boy couldn't hear him, Arthur mumbled to himself, "Especially if I fuck this up."

He turned and glowered into Daniel's eyes. Madness floated there like stray lashes. The same madness he'd witnessed for one hellish week, still lingered there, fevered and septic.

"And you," he spat, his voice escalating. "I'll have you know that this is the last one you get to bring to this pit, and I guarantee you, you won't get any satisfaction from him!"

Arthur's fingers curled. He wanted to tear into him, dig his eyes out, make him feel every ounce of pain he'd meted out with Johnny, Aiden, and himself. Make him hurt. Make him know that he hadn't won.

He knew it would be a battle. He'd tried to put an end to it all before, to end the Butcher. To kill him. To make him kill himself. Those attempts had been a mixed bag of successes and failures. Arthur had saved the last one—a redheaded boy—Alex, he believed his name was—and the brunet with the braces, and the one who hummed constantly. But the closest Arthur had come to offing the monster himself had been a small fire he'd managed to set outside Daniel Shaffer's bedroom door. The man's smoke detectors had alerted him to the danger almost immediately, leaving Arthur foul-tempered and snarling obscenities.

Arthur glanced over at this new boy and was satisfied that he had a little time left before the real horror started. With the flood in his house, he'd done enough to keep the psycho busy for a while, enough to keep him off his new prey.

It was always a challenge, however. Living people were more difficult to deal with than their spirits.

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A/N: Let me know if you want more. Thanks!


	2. Chapter 2

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Arthur lingered in the flourishing night long enough to watch the Butcher complete his ritual of padlocking the shed. The man pressed his body up against the door, as if pressing against a lover. He was probably listening—as if any abductee in their right mind would begin maneuvering out of their bindings the second their abductor left the room. Then, with a suspicious glance at his surroundings, he walked back to the main house.

Once inside, he began to scream. The sounds of plates clattered against the walls, shattering, and then splashing. All of it was muffled, but oddly comforting.

He'd found Arthur's mess.

Arthur wished he could manage a smile, but the weight of his duty to Daniel's new victim had messed with his vandalism high. So, he trudged across the yard and into his woods, walking through half-rotting fences and small animals that shivered as he passed through their bodies—far enough that he could no longer hear the killer's screams. Barely beyond the boundaries of Shaffer's property was the dying oak that he had first woken up next to. Bark gray and branches bare, ribboned in dense tentacles of ivy.

Arthur stood before it and huffed, ankles deep in spiky ferns with fronds like crooked emerald fingers. He braced himself against the tree, trying to compose himself, trying to shake off the anger and horror he'd picked up in the shed. He needed to calm down before trying anything.

The night grew heavier and the house soon became quiet. The blonde ghostly figure slipped away from the oak and languished closer to the shed.

The moon was full, unfortunately, as it lessened the shadows of Shaffer's yard. The man was guarded as hell. He seemed to have a sixth sense for anything amiss surrounding his new catch—a fresh teenaged body to play with. Arthur's nose wrinkled slightly as his mind attempted to shy away from the memories of just _how_ the Butcher liked to play. He remembered how hot and paper dry the killer's fingers were against his skin. Somehow, they always felt worse than the edge of his cold knife.

The blonde stopped before the padlocked shed, shivering in reminiscence, as if repressing silent screams.

Memory hurt—especially when you were nothing more than an entity who could do surprising little. And yet they were getting more and more difficult to recall. Any scrap of Arthur's living memory before that sodding party was fast washing away, like murky watercolor left out in the rain. Sometimes he felt like he had to act fast to salvage whatever he could, but always, could never grasp any of those precious, wisps of memory before they forever slipped away.

His hand was hesitant before plunging into the shed before the rest of him followed, every shred of his being remembering, tortured with the retention of his deathplace. It was always hard to re-enter a place like this.

Once inside, Arthur's gaze pierced through the darkness. Moonlight had been cut off, as there were no longer any windows aside from the tiny, smoky one higher up to offer an interruption in the shadow. There was one once. It was small, barely enough to allow a thin body, perhaps. It had been recently boarded up by the Butcher. He wasn't going to take any chances. Any weakness of his structure had been dealt with.

The longer Arthur's gaze remained on the window, the more he felt the memory of pain grating at his sides—his hips—as if trying desperately to push himself through that small opening. His breath felt short and he shuddered.

Was that a real memory or just his imagination? The mirage of feeling dissipated a moment later and Arthur's attention was drawn to the school desk with the bound teenager.

Drawing to his side, Arthur touched him, running his fingers down the heated side of the victim's face, alongside the crevice of his neck, and caressing down the boy's sides. The warmth of the boy's skin sent tender shivers down Arthur's spine. He couldn't help it. He missed living warmth—the draw was strong, like a fly to honey. Being trapped on the murderer's property meant that he couldn't reach out to touch warm flesh whenever he pleased.

He felt the boy tremble and groan in his drugged state. Feeling just a tad bit guilty for causing the chill, Arthur retreated just enough to get another good look at him.

"Sorry…" he muttered, knowing he could no longer be heard.

Another shudder seemed to go through the boy and his lids slowly opened, revealing blue eyes for the first time, still exceptionally glazed from the drug. Arthur was surprised that he was even this coherent. Most of the Butcher's victims were completely unconscious the first day.

Those eyes hardened and they seemed to be staring straight at him. Arthur connected with them, wishing that they _were_ staring at him. Deep regret that he rarely allowed himself to feel bled through him like a stain—a dark reminder that he never would again be heard, seen, or felt.

"Who's there?"

Arthur froze.

The bound teenager's lip cracked and his voice sounded so rough that it pained Arthur's memory of a parched throat.

None of the others had ever asked that after the Butcher's obvious departure. Arthur allowed his stiffness to ease after a strained silence, realizing that this boy was probably just delusional. Really, as much of that disgusting substance that the Butcher had given him, he really shouldn't have been able to comprehend anything at all. Mumbling at best. That's what the others usually did.

"Please…" the boy tried again, his throat sounded knotted with barely contained, raw emotion, though his words were still heavily pronounced, as if he were speaking past a wad of cotton wrapped around his tongue.

"I heard you," his whisper escalated to a near shout, wild desperation wringing through. "I _heard you."_

Thick waves of shock pounding through him, Arthur jumped forward like a startled animal, applying pressure over the teenager's mouth to silence him. He tilted his head back, listening intently for any movement from the house. Seconds trickled by and the only sound was the wind stirring dead leaves, scuttling against the wood of the shed.

Satisfied, Arthur leaned forward with pressure still tight against the boy's mouth, with the boy's eyes widened almost comically into the empty darkness.

"Idiot," he breathed against the boy's ear, knowing that the teenager had either felt or heard him, or both, as goosebumps were instantly rising along his skin in response. "I don't think that I need to remind you that you're in the fucking shed of a psychopath. So, do us both a favor and refrain from _drawing his attention_."

He released the teenager's mouth, almost too harshly in his anxiety. It only took a small second later to feel the weight of guilt for letting his temper leak through. Shoving his hands into the deep pockets of his sweatshirt Arthur mumbled his apology for the second time.

The bound teenager didn't speak for a moment, the shudder still evident as his fingers tightened at different increments over the edge of the desk. He licked his chapped lips. His face looked as if it were drained of all blood.

"You—w-what—I m-mean who are you?" That seemed to take a bit of effort.

Arthur paused, not really sure how to start this. How the hell do you gently tell someone that you're dead? A lonely little ghostly specter out to help you from the clutches of a knife-happy psycho. He blew air slowly through his proverbial lungs, pretending for a moment that he could feel the rush of the evening chill. The motion helped him think.

"Arthur… I'm Arthur," he finally said. "Can you… really hear me?" He at least wanted to classify this madness before plunging into it.

"Y-yeah… clear as day… A-Arthur," the teen whispered.

The dead seventeen-year-old felt a certain heaviness pass through him, weighing whatever traces of Arthur Kirkland remained in this world. It was an odd feeling—a dangerous cocktail of sensations: dark confusion, a deep ache, and a heart wrenching tentativeness against hope. He hated false hope above all else. And this boy was unknowingly flaunting it in his face.

When he didn't respond for a long stretch of time, the bound teenager squirmed in the bolted desk, forcing it to creak against the worn floorboards. "…Arthur?" He sounded panicked. Alarmed blue eyes darted around the empty corners of the shed.

"Still here," Arthur responded.

"Well, I-I can't tell," the teenager almost sounded like he was sulking, but he seemed to calm considerably, the previous shaking slowly receding.

"Are you a—ghost?" His voice broke in the middle of his question and a nervous sweat surfaced over his brow.

Arthur paused, not really sure how to answer that one. The term made him feel uncomfortable. He wrapped his arms tightly over his chest, as if proving that he had substance. "I… well… something like that, I suppose."

"Did you die here?" His voice grew less scratchy the more he talked.

"Yes," Arthur had to force the word out. Somehow it felt more real to vocalize it than it was to experience it. _Someone knew_. Someone knew that an Arthur had died here. Although, hopefully this one wouldn't be joining him soon. This was weird. Having an actual conversation after being silent for God knows how long.

Before the teenager could continue his flurry of questions, Arthur blurted out his own: "What's your name?"

"Alfred. Alfred Jones." He almost sounded almost resilient for a second, despite the tremor in his voice. Arthur stared at him.

The name sounded faintly familiar. Hell, something about him seemed familiar. Perhaps it was the tone that he used. Or even the way that he introduced himself that stirred a deep, resounding chord.

Arthur's brows furrowed. It was useless trying to remember. The only concrete things he could recall were the basics: his name, his school, what street he lived on, etc. Any details prior to the night of his abduction were a blur. Perhaps this Alfred was somehow a piece of that.

"Alfred," Arthur said, getting his attention. "New Dover Heights High. Does that sound familiar?"

Alfred was silent for a moment, even his slight struggling had stilled. "Yeah. I go there."

Okay. So, another student. From the same school as himself and the others. Serial killers had their patterns. Shaffer seemed fixated on that school.

"You sound familiar," Arthur tried his luck at probing Alfred's mind.

Alfred grinned a little. "Everyone knows me. I'm the quarterback of Dover Heights High School's football team."

"Oh."

He didn't even try to hide the disappointment in his tone. That probably would explain why the name at least sounded familiar—it had probably been floating around the school every Friday night. Nothing that could really help him get his memory back.

"So, how are we getting out of here, Art?" Alfred asked, staring at the worn boards that made the ceiling of the shed.

"_You're_ getting out of here. And I'm not sure yet… I'll think of something." Arthur found himself sitting on the floor next to the desk, hugging his legs to his chest. His chin rested on his knee, staring at the boarded up window.

"But you're coming too," his voice radiated, sounding almost soft and solemn for a brief moment, so resolute, as if he were the deciding factor in whether or not he wanted a ghost following him around.

"I'm dead, moron. I can't leave." Arthur spat his words, yet his voice faltered in its sudden harshness.

Gone was the peculiar softness, instantly replaced by Alfred's unruly tone. "But why not? You can float behind me all you want!"

"I-I don't float! And… I don't know why I can't leave. I just can't… There's a certain point in this bloody property where I can't pass through. I just don't know… _I don't know why_." Arthur's voice was shaking and he curled into himself even tighter, the pale fringe falling over his eyes as he ducked into his knees. The bend of his posture might have looked unnatural if he were visible.

Alfred fell silent.

Arthur felt himself fade from the world for a moment and he fought to stay present, but it was useless. The pull was irresistible, the brief sensation of falling encompassing him as darkness closed in. He barely heard Alfred calling his name once more, but he was already too far gone to answer. The world slipped from his grasp, the sights and sensations of the living gliding like silk between his dead fingers, and the blurred lines of the shed melted into nothing.

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A/N: Thanks for the review, lovely!


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